This is how Shaw, in the preface to Heartbreak House (1919), summed up the ruling class in prewar England:
“In short, power and culture were in separate compartments. The barbarians were not only literally in the saddle, but on the front bench in the House of Commons, with nobody to correct their incredible ignorance of modern thought and political science but upstarts from the counting-house, who had spent their lives furnishing their pockets instead of their minds. Both, however, were practised in dealing with money and with men, as far as acquiring the one and exploiting the other went ; and although this is as undesirable an expertness as that of the medieval robber baron, it qualifies men to keep an estate or a business going in its old routine without necessarily understanding it, just as Bond Street tradesmen and domestic servants keep fashionable society going without any instruction in sociology.”
The war pulled back the curtains. The incredible lack of sense of the ruling class, of the industrialists, generals, journalists, academics and their like was only matched by their incredible smugness. The result of this intellectual catastrophe could be measured in the blood of the swampy battlefields of the Somme. The same story could be told of the other great powers engaged in the war: as for instance in the Austro-Hungarian empire, which underwent the horrors of the Eastern Front to defeats unimaginable at Czernowiz and the Siege of Przemyśl. Robert Musil served on the Italian front, so he was removed from where the meatgrinder of the Eastern Front, and the newspapers, to Karl Kraus’s horror, tried to paper over the bloodshed with lies – however, the shocks of these events couldn’t be hidden. In Joseph Roth’s Radetzsky March, an officer cries out: “war is here! We’ve long expected it. Yet it surprised us.” Roth’s novel is all about the limbo into which Kakistan [Kaiser und Konig land] army fell in its endless deployment at the edges of the empire. The officers, addicted to gambling, drink, and brothels in those border garrisons, did not form the kind of staff that would take maximum advantage in battle, or be very economical in spending the lives of their troops.
This is the background to Musil’s essayism – a sort of philosophical extension of the Essay to an existentialist creed. In the Man without Qualities, which is set in the year before the outbreak of the war, the hero, Ulrich, considers the lack of any exact knowledge among the ruling class as it is amplified in the particular case of a murderer, Moosbrugger. The trial of Moosbrugger fascinates Ulrich – just as the faits divers have fascinated intellectuals all down through the 20th and 21st century – for reasons he can’t quite put his finger on. It is as though this crime were symbolic of something deep in the social unconcious – but what? Is it something like what Ivan Karamazov called an “allegory” – an exemplary instance of a social malady. Here the experts called to judge Moosbrugger’s sanity make their diagnoses without either affirming or negating the question, before judges who have no knowledge of sociology or psychology, to decide the fate of a confused case of psychopathology. The blind lead the blind lead the murderer, and at the end of the train there is the victim.
Chapter 62 – “The earth, and especially Ulrich, honor the utopia of essayism” – begins with Moosbrugger’s trial, but leads discursively, as the topics in the Man without Qualities tend to, by a mysterious route of associations in the direction of Ulrich’s self-consciousness, and through that to the modern condition. Ulrich, when he was studying mathematics in his younger days, came upon a phrase – which, for intellectual twenty somethings, means more than just putting words together. A phrase is a discovery – as solid as a face. Ulrich’s discovery is of the phrase: to live hypothetically. That is, to take no incident in life as a conclusion, a fixed and final line in a proof, but rather to treat one’s certainties – the ego, the act, the social, the moral, the ontological, etc. – as hypotheses, conditionals waiting for proof. This young thought, Ulrich now thinks, is part of what he calls Essayismus.
There are people, we all know them, who live as though they were in a novel, or a drama. People who exist, somehow, within a certain lighting and soundtrack -to shift media. Ulrich is of the type who lives as though in an essay. “Approximately as an essay in the succession of its parts takes a thing up from many sides without grasping it whole – for a wholly grasped thing loses at once its breadth and melts into a concept – he believed it was the best way to look at and handle the whole world and his own life.”
This puts more of an existential slant on “essayism”. I’m thinking about essayism as I read Brian Dillon’s book, Essayism, which doesn’t quite get down to the bedrock of Ulrich’s political-erotico-social position. Not that this counts against the book, which doesn’t have Musil’s ambitions – but I think it would be a nice problem to ponder – the essay’s invasion of the novel, and the sense abroad that the novel has lost its predominance – which, to me, simply means its attractiveness as a model for living your life.
I am behind the times, and made the decision, long ago, to live as though in a novel. So there is that.
